Thursday, November 26, 2009

How about a new interpreter language similar to Delphi?

I'm thinking for a long time about creating a interpreted language with the hope that will improve application development by at least 200%, you might think I'm joking now or that I'm out of my mind, but read on and you will understand how development time decreases.
Did you know that you "waste" somewhere between 5 and 10% of your time writing variable types? I mean

var myvar : TMyType;

how about the time wasted "asking" Google to help you with your question? Oh... not to mention about the bad names(in most programming and interpreted languages) for functions classes, i.e. writeln, readln, print, printf, strcpy, etc.
Anywayz I don't want to waste more of your time with this kind of stuff, I'm pretty sure you got the idea until now.
Here's the grammar(until now for my "to be" interpreted language")

As you can see there are no begins I consider as wasting time to write, any declaration ends with end keyword.
The main idea is that all function/class names tell you what it actually does, for instance StringCopy, to copy a part from a string and Console.WriteLine(I know it's like delphi combined with .NET, but it actually looks clean!).
I think it will be created in Delphi but compiled with Freepascal so it can go cross platform baby!
Anyways, I really want to read your opinions and maybe start the project with someone.

"Can you tell me why do you want to go for pascal syntax?"Pascal is the way to go in order for other programmers and novice to be able to program without searching for matching bracket in code ex. if you replace "{" and "}" with "begin" and "end", you will notice that a lot of people can understand your code even without having programming skills whatsoever."According to me it is very old and being highly verbos it requires more typing compared to say C# (or BASIC for that matter)."Yes it does, that's why I'm trying to strip out anything that's not very useful, for instanceif CONDITION then CODE end;is better thanif CONDITION then begin CODE end;because you check if a condition is true and then give a list of statements to be executed."What have you thought about the UI part. How will you prere... Are you going to develop your own?"The UI part is less significant and easy to implement, you can always take delphi's vcl and forward it into a dynamic class which can be easily accessed.I am thinking of implementing the UI myself by making it full Unicode."I would suggest you to give this deep thought."Yes, I am giving it a deep thought, that's why I ask for other peoples opinion, if they/you would want to program in such a language.I thank you for your comment and hope you continue as part of the project or at least contribute with opinions.

Hello, I agree with you that a lot of methods have very lousy names and would be better to write the full name for better understanding in the future, but I also like the c syntax better, you should consider writing a grammar similar to C.